Modern oncologic treatment usually involves a combination of treatments, including surgery, radiation therapy and/or chemotherapy. Incredible advances have been made in all of these disciplines over the past few decades, with, for example, radiation oncologists now being able to target and conform their beams in order to minimize unnecessary treatment of normal tissues and with the medical oncologists expanding their armamentarium to include biologics specifically targeted to tumor cells. Unfortunately, however, with only very few exceptions, the patient outcomes that have resulted from these advances have been incremental at best. Such disappointing results fly in the face of the significant benefits that many of these innovative treatments have demonstrated at the preclinical level. One explanation for this failure may be the translation of bench science to the bedside or vice versa, and is embodied in the standard practice employed by researchers when assessing a new strategy or agent: that is, each novel agent or technique, etc. is tested either in isolation or as a comparison against standard of care. Even when tested in combinations (i.e. with other agents), at no time is a novel agent assessed in conjunction with the likely additional modalities, surgery or irradiation. This is despite the fact that, for example, ~50% of patients wil experience fractionated radiation therapy during the course of their treatment, a therapy which is known to affect their tumor, its vasculature and the immediately surrounding normal tissues, all elements that may, in turn, affect the tumor's response to subsequent chemotherapy and/or biologics. In order to address this deficiency, our application requests funds to purchase a precision X- irradiator/cone beam CT for animal and cellular use at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC). The instrument, a small animal radiation research platform or SARRP, will address a critical need in medical research at the institution since it will allow investigatos to assess the synergy of agents with realistic radiation protocols in preclinical models, thereby trul modeling the human experience. Furthermore, the SARRP will be used in conjunction with other state-of-the-art imaging equipment, expanding researchers' abilities by allowing them to perform image-guided irradiation of small animal models (rats and mice). Overall, the addition of a SARRP to the technologies available at the University of Rochester will increase opportunities in both normal and tumor tissue research, providing investigators with more appropriate model systems for assessing tumor- normal tissue microenvironment, normal tissue effects seen in many cancer patients, and benign diseases.